The Cassini spacecraft now orbiting Saturn, has passed very close to the strange world of Iapetus aka Japetus. Arthur Charles Clarke wrote of this bi-colored Moon of Saturn in his Science Fiction work "2001 A Space Odyssey", he had Iapetus as a giant eye.

Voyager 2 determined it was not an eye, but shaped like the Yin Yang symbol of Asian religious beliefs. One side is covered by a substance that is blacker than any tar or coal or rock we know of. It seems to be carbon like. The other side is covered in ice or snow of some kind.

This Moon also has a strange mountain ridge at the equator, that goes almost the entire globe. It looks like a giant walnut in shape. There is no logical explanation for this feature. There is no reason, Iapetus would want to tell us about it's equator like this. I suppose a large impact in the north or south pole might do it. The more we learn about this world, the stranger it gets. As you can see, I have been collecting these images for quite a long time.